Achieving cleaner growth in agriculture: establishing feasible mitigation through a bottom-up approach

Achieving climate emissions to meet the 1.5 °C target by 2050 is particularly challenging for the agricultural sector. Cleaner Growth Mitigation Measures (CG-MM) are practices and technologies which balance food production and greenhouse gas abatement and are also identified as being economically acceptable. This paper explores a large number of CG-MMs to assess their feasibility using a novel participatory filtering process. Each measure is explored through a series of mapping exercises with supply chain actors to identify the impact on greenhouse gases and their applicability to different farming systems. These were then refined in a series of farmer workshops to identify which measures were considered feasible to adopt. Results show that acceptance of CG-MMs by the industry and the farmers themselves is limited. A pessimistic estimate of 50 to 60% of potential abatement could be lost due to lack of acceptance of currently available CG-MMs. This impacts expectations on decarbonisation trajectories for the agricultural sector to reach net zero by 2050. This also argues for targeted approaches to agricultural support in order to capture some of the lost abatement.